Do Intelligent People Consume More Alcohol?

No one ever said being intelligent was easy. Analyzing issues to death, translating Winnie the Pooh into Latin just for fun, and writing books about the social and industrial significance of the Twinkie is time consuming and – let's be honest – a little nerve wracking. Pour yourself a martini (shaken, not stirred), kick back, and relax.

Do intelligent people drink more than those of us who are, perhaps, not quite the sharpest knives in the drawer? Research would seem to say that's the case. The big question, of course, is why? According to evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, it's because it's "evolutionarily novel" behavior and intelligent people are drawn to novel experiences. The hypothesis is that more intelligent people are better able to cope with, or are drawn to, experiences and entities that did not exist hundreds of thousands of years ago on the savannahs where our ancestors first stood upright and, consequently, developed lower back pain.

In the grand scheme of things, we haven't been drinking alcohol for very long. Certainly, we've been drinking it longer than we've been spraying cheese product from cans but actual brewing – of beer, say – only goes back about six to ten-thousand years. (There's a great debate raging, too, about which came first: beer or bread? We'll go with the bread team.)

Other studies have broken down the demographics of who drinks most and the results are eye-opening, to say the least. Do you hold a degree or did you, at least, finish high school? Are you Jewish, Catholic, or a non-believer? Do you live in New England, New York, or the West Coast? Are you liberal or, at least, liberalish? If you answered yes to any or all of those, chances are you're a tippler. Conversely, if you're an African-American Southern Protestant, you're more likely to smile politely when someone offers you a drink and ask, instead, for a glass of tea, sweet tea, mind you. A fascinating chart detailing vocabulary scores tags the more verbose among us as more likely to drink, as well. Mind you, zillions of exceptions will be found among these demographics.

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But it's the idea that drinking is evolutionarily new that seems particularly compelling. Intelligent people, so the thinking goes, tend to be greater risk takers whereas less intelligent folks are more averse to risk. (This vaguely ties in with the idea, as well, that women – who generally drink less than men – are also more prone to be religious because it's less risky to be religious than not.)

And that's an interesting point, too. Nowhere in the research cited does it say that intelligent people are less likely to engage in potentially harmful behavior, such as binge drinking. It does say that intelligent people, drawn to the novelty of drinking, are more likely to engage in such behavior because it is evolutionarily novel.

"Human experience with concentrations of ethanol higher than 5% that is attained by decaying fruits is therefore very recent," writes Kanazawa in his Discovery blog, The Scientific Fundamentalist. "More importantly, any unintentional, accidental, and haphazard consumption of alcohol in the ancestral environment, before the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, happened as a result of eating, not drinking, whereas alcohol is almost entirely consumed today by drinking, not eating. (Deep-fried beer is a very recent exception.) The Hypothesis would therefore predict that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to prefer drinking modern alcoholic beverages (beer, wine, and distilled spirits) than less intelligent individuals, because the substance and the method of consumption are both evolutionarily novel."